Alfred Hitchock, my new A3 print, completed on Friday 18 January 2013. It’s available here in my Etsy shop.

Hitchcock was surprisingly difficult to draw. Some people have features that are angular enough that you can take measurements pretty easily, a bit like navigating via fixed points in space. With Hitchcock, no such luck - he’s all curves, and very few of them intersecting. So this portrait took a lot of looking, a lot of redrawing (in pencil)… and then getting a feel for when it was right not to look at the source, and instead let the pen do its semi-random thing, to give the drawing some life and become a thing in itself rather than just a slavish imitation.

After that, the brushwork was pretty much plain sailing and I was able to improvise the layers of wash nicely, pulling the ink back off the page with a rag when I needed. That kind of painting is always the most fun. I’m pleased with the outcome, and my artist’s proof is now on the wall above my computer as I type this. ‘Good evening…’

I went book shopping for more material for new prints. I emerged from Skoob Books into the snowy London lunchtime yesterday £39 lighter in the pocket. £39! Talk about suffering for your art.

This is a good notebook. After falling out of love with Moleskine thanks to their atrocious, ink-killing ‘sketch pad’ I’ve started using this, from the Hand Book Journal Co (or Global Art Materials Limited, or whatever). 128 pages of 160gsm paper, ever so slightly shaggy. Does not leech the life out of black ink, but does slightly fuzz-up a fountain pen nib. Pricey too, at £13 a go. But it’s a solid book that accepts note-taking and drawing (and some watercolour) without griping, so it’s currently the best one going for me, for now.

Marcel Proust

Proust is one of those figures who kind of towers below a lot of writers. It's the damn length of A la recherche du temps perdu that's the problem. Like Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest et al it's one of those works that everyone should have read but just hasn't got round to reading (or has reached page 63 and given up at the sheer cliff face of words ahead). Personally I was always fascinated by Proust the man semi-retiring from the world (partly through intention, partly through a frail constitution) to write for years in his cork-lined room. I like small-scale heroics like that.

I was pretty pleased with the drawing that this print is taken from. Faster than other recent pieces, and possibly better.

Anyway, the print is available now in the shop.

Giil Sans in My Shopping

Haven't had a Tunnock's Caramel Wafer for ages, saw them in the supermarket the other day, loved the (only slightly - grudgingly? - updated) package design, bought them. Almost chipped a tooth on them. The secret is to let them come to room temperature, and for that room to be somewhere outside the Arctic Circle (they're made in Uddingston, near Glasgow, so draw your own conclusions).

But yes, check out the Gill Sans. Who these days would have the balls to stick so such a classic weight and draughty track? They're simply not cool, just functional, delicious, gone in about 45 seconds. That's design right there.

Write-Ups

I've been working on other projects for about a month, but now I'm back and I find the shop has had a couple of very nice write-ups online. The first is on Thrillist:

http://www.thrillist.com/home-gadgets/standard-designs_art_books_online-shops

And the second is on sofa.com:

http://www.sofa.com/uncategorized/its-a-witty-sign-of-the-times

Ah yes, all public appreciation gladly accepted...

Ballardian Plastics

Creepy - but don't have nightmares. This is from a fascinating article about JG Ballard's typographical experiments, which can be found here.

The Joy of Low-Tech

Call it a minor investment. This is my recently-acquired Salter portable postal weighing scale. Why anyone would want a portable postal weighing scale, I don't know - maybe there are places where accurately weighing your items to within 10g in order to select the correct postage is illegal (probably in a country where MC Escher is prime minister). But it was relatively cheap - I think about £6 - and it looks dinkily functional, like a distant relative of something Dieter Rams might have created on his lunch break.

New Greetings Cards

I've also, after much deliberation, begun selling sets of cards taken directly from my portrait prints series. In each set you'll get five cards & envelopes, the cards featuring either Jacques Tati (pictured), George Orwell, Dylan Thomas or Oscar Wilde, depending on which one you buy. I may do others, we'll see how these ones go first.

Have a look at them in the shop.

Recession Books

Inspired by my love of the great Penguin Books cover designs of the 1940s, I've created a series of prints showing how classic literature might look if it were subject to the same cutbacks that everything else seems to be undergoing in the present financial calamity. Finding a way to laugh at problems is a good starting point for dealing with them, I find. That's my approach here.

Anyway, check them out in the shop.